Selecting a range of cells in Excel

Anyone who has spent any time at all working in Excel, and chewed up a lot time moving between cells and selecting cells by either clicking and dragging, or using the arrow keys. Tonight's tip is a very simple trick to get around this problem. If you know the cell reference of the place where you want to go, and want to select the cells from your current position to that point, simply do the following:

1. Beginning at the cell from which you want the selection to begin, press F5, and the Go To dialog box will open.

2. In the Reference field, type the cell reference of where you want the selection to end. In this example, we're selecting all of the data for pitchers from the 1871 baseball season.

3. Hold down the SHIFT key, but don't press ENTER. Instead click OK.

4. The full range of data will now be selected.

This example involves a small range of cells, but this technique is most helpful when you're trying to select (or move around in) large ranges of cells covering hundreds or thousands of rows.